The Wanderer

by Fritz Leiber

  “Do you hear that, Mr. Hunter?” young McHeath called, crouching in the back end of the truck, his rifle ready. Hunter remembered Doc saying how “those murdering drunken kids” would be coming.

  The three of them ran for the Corvette. As Hunter piled behind the wheel, Margo in back, Rama Joan in front, on the other side of Ann, he thought, Doc would have walked. Or would he? At least he’d have said something.

  He started the motor, then faced around, holding up his right arm.

  “If cars come up behind us, you pass me,” he shouted to Hixon. “That way we’ll be able to use the momentum pistol. If they start pointing guns, fire on ’em! O.K., everybody, here we go!”

  It wasn’t good, he thought as he shifted into gear, but it would have to do.

  RICHARD HILLARY made the acquaintance of Vera Carlisle at a moment when the girl was sitting in the mud in Tewkesbury and crying quietly.

  Sitting in the mud was getting to be quite the way to meet people, Richard reflected, and truth to tell it was at least a great deal better than finding them lying face down in it.

  She was crouched so mouselike in the little side street and crying so quietly that he might well have missed her had not the night been still so light two hours after sunset. She was carrying nothing but a small transistor wireless, which she hugged like a baby.

  During the past thirty-six hours Richard had witnessed several rescues and reunions and numerous befriendments, and now he realized that he wanted very much to befriend someone himself. He was acutely anxious that no one but he should hear this girl’s soft sobs, or come upon them before her sobs had been stilled and at least the first gestures of comradeship made.

  As he approached her he had the thought of how chilly it was getting and the memory of how warmly the couples had seemed to be sleeping last night under the straw, and also the thought of how this was the end of the world, or at least a very good imitation; yet at the same time it seemed to him that those thoughts did not fully describe his present motives.

  He offered her fresh bread he had saved from a thrifty scatter of little loaves dropped near Cleeve from a helicopter, but it turned out that Vera’s chief discomfort was that she was thirsty. Getting water in the new tidal areas was no simple matter, with all the reservoirs and wells and springs salt-drowned. Some pipes held fresh water, but that was chancy.

  He remembered a pub being looted two squares back, and as they went toward it past the watermarked, half-timbered houses and a hotel named the Royal Hop Pole, he discovered another of her griefs: she had lost a heel and in any case her tight, pointed slippers weren’t the best for walking.

  There was quite a line of looters at the pub. Oh, we law-abiding Britons, Richard thought, we queue up even for looting. He remembered a shoe store just beyond it and broke into it determinedly—which was quite easy, since the tide had done that before him—and managed to find in the wet, reeking drawers a pair of tennis shoes for Vera and some heavy socks for both of them. All the articles were sopping, of course, but that was of no consequence.

  By that time the queue was shorter, and soon he and Vera had received a bottle of beer apiece and one small flask of rum between them, under the fierce watchful eye of a brawny man who might even have been the actual proprietor, though he did not say so.

  Outside, a fat man was pointing down the street and saying: “Ah, there’s the bastid now!”

  It was the Wanderer, rising in its bloated-X face and ringed almost symmetrically by the white shards of the moon.

  Vera glanced at it for a moment, then pressed her lips together and looked away. Richard felt a surge of approval at her reaction. She held her elbow out toward him just a little. He took it firmly and escorted her down the street in the way he’d originally been going, setting an easy pace at first as they drank their beer and munched some bread. He told her nothing about his Malvern Hills plan. Time enough for that when they’d crossed the roaring Severn by Telford’s old iron bridge—if it hadn’t been torn away.

  Vera turned on her transistor wireless, and they listened all the way around the dial to a sound like bacon frying. Richard wanted to tell her to throw it away, but instead he asked her how her new shoes fitted, and she smiled at him and said: “They’re heavenly.”

  Only an hour ago Richard had been tramping lonely in the midst of a mob, and thinking of all the millions or scores of millions of new dead there must be all over the world, and wondering if it really mattered at all.

  He had thought, Does the world need so many people? Take the crowd around me now—winnowed by the flood, yet most of them still stupid stereotypes the world could well do without. How many people does it take to sustain a reasonably rich culture? Aren’t more than that a waste? And aren’t millions of stereotypes an overly high price to pay for a few exceptions? Isn’t there something utterly gross about the concept of an endlessly, planlessly multiplied humanity, perhaps eventually swarming like rats to the stars? Did having so many people ever matter, except to the people? The world needs and deserves this winnowing!

  But now his thought was that if just one more person had been taken, that person might have been Vera. In theory there were tens of thousands of Veras, he supposed, but only one where this Richard Hillary could have found her. He gripped her arm a little more snugly.

  Chapter

  Thirty-six

  PAUL HAGBOLT stared down into the bottomless dark as if the circular window on which he rested were the top of a great aquarium, the stars and the tiny semicircles of Earth and Wanderer a mysterious marine luminescence, or as if the round were that of a glass slide under a microscope, and the stars, diamond infusoria.

  There was a faint rustling and then a little cry—Miaow crawling weightless through the flowers and calling some discovery to Tigerishka.

  From beside Paul, the larger cat said: “Because mankind is young, you think the universe is, too. But it is old, old, old. Tomorrow and tomorrow…petty pace…last syllable of time…tale told by an idiot…yes!

  “You think that space is empty, but it’s full. Your own solar system is one of the few primeval spots left, like a small, weed-grown lot overlooked by builders in the heart of a vast and ancient city that has overgrown all the countryside.

  “In the galaxy where the Wanderer grew in orbit, the planets are so thick around each sun they shroud its light and make a slum of space, a teeming city of a galaxy. It is the boast of our engineers, ‘Wherever a sunbeam escapes, we place a planet.’ Or they moor a field, to turn the sunlight back.

  “Tens of thousands of planets around each sun, troubling each other with ten thousand tides, so that tidal harmonizing is half our civil engineering. Planets following each other so closely in the same orbit that they make elliptical necklaces, each pearl a world. You know those filigree nests of balls your Chinese carve of ivory, so that you peer and peer to find the center, and end with the feeling that there’s a little of infinity locked in there? That’s how solar systems look, most places.

  “You haven’t yet heard this news, simply because of the snaily slowness with which light travels. If you could wait a billion years, you’d see the galaxies grow dim, not by the death of stars, but by the masking and miserly hoarding of their light by the stars’ owners.

  “All but a tiny remainder of the star-shrouding planets are artificial. Billions of trillions of dead suns and cold moons and planetary gas giants have been mined to get the matter to make them—your Egyptian pyramids multiplied by infinity. Throughout the universe, natural planets are as rare as young thoughts.

  “Your own galaxy of the Milky Way is no exception. Planet-choked suns chiefly make the great dark central cloud which puzzles your astronomers.

  “A pond can fill with infusoria almost as quickly as a ditch-water puddle. A continent can fill with rabbits almost as swiftly as a single field. And intelligent life can spread to the ends of the universe—those ends which are everywhere—as swiftly as it grows to maturity on a single planet.

  “
The planets of a trillion suns can fill with spaceship-builders as quickly as those of one. Ten million trillion galaxies can become infected with the itch of thought—that great pandemic!—as readily as one.

  “Intelligent life spreads faster than the plague. And science grows more uncontrollably than cancer. On every undisturbed natural planet, life crawls and flutters for billions of years, then overnight comes the blossoming, the swift explosion across the great black distances of seeds that grow like weeds wherever they fall, and then the explosion of their seeds on, on, to the incurving ends of the universe.

  “There is the drama of meeting other life forms—shocks, moments of poignant wonder. And then, much too soon, comes the ennui.

  “The ditch-water puddle, where yesterday a few amoebas swam, is thick with writhing life—and the pond, too. The algae gleam like jewels. Then soon the pool grows clouded.” She pointed a claw toward the thick stars. “Those diamonds you see out there are lies. The suns that sent that bright light now are masked.”

  Tigerishka turned her tapering muzzle from the star-spangled window and spoke to Paul directly.

  “The universe is full, Paul. Intelligent life is everywhere, its planets darkening the stars, its engineers recklessly spending the power of the suns to make mind’s environment—burning matter to energy everywhere to make more form, more structure, more mind. The Word—to call mind that—goes forth, and soon there is nothing but the Word. The universe with all its great reaches and magnificent privacies becomes a slum, begins to die of too much mind—though they can never see that—just as a shallow sunlit bay can die of too much life.

  “Immortality is achieved, breaking down the individual mind’s limits future ward. Your world, Paul, is one of the few islands of death left in the sea of life everlasting.

  “With hyperspatial travel and psionic communication, the ends of the universe are closer together than the planets of your solar system. The far-flung galaxies are more centralized than the countries of your world, than even your country’s fifty-one states. And the affairs of the cosmos are ordered by a democratic rulership more benign and more terrible than that of any imagined god.

  “It may be that your own primitive visions of heaven—and especially your ambiguous attitude toward it: that heaven is both a great wonder and a great bore—are merely valid intuitions of that government.

  “Security and safety are its watchwords. It is conservative, ruled by the old, who are everywhere a great majority since the achievement of immortality. It is painstaking, patient, just, merciful—but only to the weak!—and infinitely stubborn. Its records alone, etched on molecules, occupy the artificial planets of two star clusters. Its chief aim is simply to remember and treasure—but only as a memory!—everything that has ever happened.

  “Any minimally intelligent, respectable, safe race of beings can confidently expect from it support for their life-ways. It is always against the expenditure of energy for any purpose except conservation and security: it opposes the exploration of hyperspace, or even its use, except for the transport of its police. Its greatest fear is of something that might seriously injure or altogether disrupt the universe, for now that—bar hyperspace—it is no longer possible to think of safety in infinity and the unexplored, a great cosmic death-dread has arisen.

  “Yet since even immortals must reproduce, if only at a minimal rate, to keep up the illusion that they are still truly alive, the government must continually find space for new beings. They’ll be coming for your space soon, Paul. There’s been a change in the policy toward the remaining wild worlds. Heretofore they were looked on as preserves of novelty, to be shielded until they grew to galactic stature. But now their living surface is needed, and their matter, and the energy of their suns. They are to be integrated into the cosmic super-culture. Carefully, thoughtfully, and with kindness—but it will happen to you and probably within the next two hundred of your years. And it will not be a slow process—once it begins, all the wild worlds will be occupied and integrated within decades.

  “To reduce its policies to a single statement, the aim of the cosmic government is to conserve intelligence until the cosmos dies. There was a time when this meant ‘forever,’ but now we see it means until mind is maximized, until all matter that can be is shaped to the service and sustaining of intelligence, until entropy is reversed to the greatest degree possible within the limits of this universe.

  “They look on this as the millennium. We look on it as death.

  “My people are the Wild Ones—the younger races, races like my own which grew from solitary killers, which have lived closer to death and valued style more than security, freedom more than safety; races with a passionate sadistic tinge; or coldly scientific, valuing knowledge almost more than life.

  “We rate growth above immortality, adventure higher than safety. Great risks and dangers do not trouble us.

  “We want to travel more substantially in time. Not just observe, but change the past, make it a fuller one, revitalize the countless dead, live in a dozen—a hundred!—presents and not one, go back to the beginning and rebuild.

  “We will explore the future time-wise, too, not just to reassure ourselves that there’s a comfortable hearth fire dying there—Intelligence in its last bed and moribund. We’d grow another cosmos to live on in!

  “We want to range through mind more thoroughly—that crumpled rainbow plane inside our skulls. Although telepathy and psi are commonplace, we still don’t know if there are other worlds upon the other side of the collective inward darkness—and how to visit them, an undared dream.

  “We’d change all that: explore the realms of the spirit like strange continents, sail them like space, discover if all our minds rest like tiny rainbow seashells on the shores of the same black, storm-beaten, unconscious sea. Maybe that way there lie untrodden worlds. Also, we want machines that make thoughts real—another little job no one has done.

  “But mostly we would open hyperspace—not use it just for rapid coastal trips, navigating only its surge-troubled fringes and keeping always in sight, however dimly, the shores and headlands of our own particular cosmos…but boldly sail beyond the universal shelf into the deep unknown with its vaster storms. That is a task for galaxies, not for planets—one or a hundred—though we will take our chances if we must.

  “We think that countless cosmoses besides our own ride in the whirlwind void of hyperspace—a billion trillion scraps in the tornado, a billion trillion snowflakes in the storm. These won’t be cosmoses like ours, we think, but built of different basic particles—or never particles at all, but ever-changing continuities. Worlds of solidity or holes in that. Worlds without light. Worlds in which light may move as slow as spoken words or swift as thought. Worlds in which bits of matter grow on thought as here mind seems to grow on molecules.

  “Worlds with no wall between mind and mind, and worlds that are more prison-celled than ours. Worlds where thought is real and every beast’s a god. A fluid universe—its planets bubbles—and worlds that branch in time like mighty vines.

  “Worlds in which space is crossed with spiderwebs instead of flecked with stars—cosmos of vines or roads. A cosmos with solids but no gravity, worlds of dimensions more and less than ours, worlds different in every basic law—chromatic scale of cosmoses, spectra of creation.

  “Or if we find no worlds in hyperspace, then build them there!—create the monster particle that births a cosmos, bursting from this cosmos as from a chrysalis, no matter if this cosmos be destroyed.

  “So much for our larger aims. Our smaller ones: a screen for all we do. Privacy for our planet and our thoughts. Weapons as we may need them. Free research, as secret as we want it. No inspection! The right to take our planet where we will, even if there’s no orbit waiting us which we have paid the rent on. To live between the stars if we so choose, out in the chilly, sunless wilderness, burning the prairie grass of hydrogen—or in the oceanic spatial deeps that lie between the island galaxies. The right always
to travel hyperspace, now reserved for government and police. The right to take a chance, the right to suffer. The right to be unwise, the right to die.

  “These aims are hateful to the government, which values every frightened mouse and falling sparrow as equal to a tiger burning bright. The government wants a police station winking blue by every sun, a cop pounding a beat around each planet, squad cars roaming the interstellar dark—fuzz everywhere, blurring the diamond-pristine, lucent stars.

  “Millennia ago the government began to nibble at our freedoms—we Wild Ones, we Recalcitrants, we Untamed. We banded on one planet of our own, won some prestige and powers, kept up our screens, lived our own lives, seemed to be gaining ground—only to find we’d made ourselves a single easy target for the police.

  “A century ago we all were put on trial. Soon it was clear the case would go against us: no privacy, no secret research, no hyperspatial traveling, no chance to solve the universe’s problems on our own.

  “Surrender then—or die? We cut and ran.

  “Since then it’s been a never-ending chase. The Hounds of Heaven always on our track: planet pursued by planets untiring. No spot in all the cosmos safe for us. No outback far enough in all the galaxies, except the hyperspatial storm we have not mastered—reality’s hurricane.

  “Think of the sea as being hyperspace, its surface as the universe we know, its ships as planets, we, a submarine.

  “We surface near some solitary sun not yet built up with artificial orbs. Then they appear, and we must dive again. Sometimes we stay too long, must fight a battle before we vanish in the void’s cruel dark. We’ve blown up three suns just for diversions! Those novas are in distant galaxies. We may have killed a planet; can’t be sure.

  “Sometimes our cold pursuers make a truce and plead with us a while, and make us offers before they aim their killing bombs and rays—hoping we’ll see the arc light of their reason that glares always above the cosmic prison yard.